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Don’t mess with China, or you’ll meet your Waterloo and also break your four Achilles’ heels.
That’s the garbled, kitchen-sink warning China is throwing at President Biden after his order for intelligence agencies to probe whether the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab instead of being transmitted from bats to humans.
The insulting, threatening tone, conveyed by English-language media controlled by the ruling Communist Party, is so over-the-top that it’s a giveaway: China is hiding something about the origins of the virus and is determined to keep it hidden.
“Washington is too arrogant to realize that its vicious accusations against China have become a political gamble for itself,” claimed the Global Times, the communist mouthpiece. “It has staked too many bargaining chips on credit from international morality. It actually has no way to back down from this dangerous status.”
“The US could meet its Waterloo in this battle,” the unsigned article said, adding America is “exposing to the world its four ‘Achilles heels.’ ”
The diatribe was the fourth attack the Global Times has published since Biden’s order last Wednesday. One claimed the goal of the US is “to severely thwart China’s national interests.”
It called Biden’s probe “a big lie” and accused America of following in the footsteps of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels by saying “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”
In reality, it has been obvious from the get-go that the world was not getting the full story about COVID-19. Recall that Beijing “disappeared” some early scientists who worked on the virus and misled the World Health Organization about human-to-human transmission, saying there was none.
The WHO, in response, was either incompetently gullible or complicit, with its director praising China’s openness and leadership on containing the outbreak.
Since then, the virus has claimed 3.55 million lives around the world, nearly 600,000 of them in the United States.
In seeming to allow a subsequent WHO probe, China restricted access and gave investigators the conclusions it wanted disseminated, effectively neutering that probe as well.
The hide-the-truth scam worked because there was no way to get the facts without China’s cooperation and because the American media embraced anything that made then-President Donald Trump look bad.
With Trump accusing China of a coverup, calling it the “China virus” and pulling out of the WHO, Democrats and the media took to calling Trump’s version of events “disinformation” or a “conspiracy theory.” Their aim was to blame him and hand the election to Biden.
They claimed to be following science, but in fact their working hypothesis was purely political: When Trump or other Republicans were critical of China, the media would instantly play defense for the communists.
Wikipedia and other sites quickly echoed the idea that any view other than the animal-to-human transmission was a conspiracy theory. Even now, pages resembling scholarly work end up doing nothing more than citing anti-Trump media as trusted primary sources. Thus was a single view cast in stone as the only legitimate one.
Naturally, Big Tech helped to seal the bubble by blocking articles that raised other possibilities.
But facts are stubborn and created a fundamental problem: the certainty of animal-to-human transmission remained unconfirmed despite thousands of tests.
A March article in MIT Technology Review reported, “More than a year after COVID-19 began, no food animal has been identified as a reservoir for the pandemic virus.” It added that China had tested “tens of thousands of animals, including pigs, goats, and geese . . .” without finding the culprit, meaning the pandemic “remains an unsolved mystery.”
This is not what Biden wanted and he clearly had no interest in keeping the case open. He announced the order for the intelligence agencies’ 90-day investigation only after he was severely criticized for shutting down a State Department probe on the origins that was started under Trump and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“Trump was bad” would normally be a sufficient argument, but unfortunately for Biden, some of his reliable media allies began to consider the lab-accident theory.
Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the left’s patron saint of anti-Trumpism, switched and now admits he is uncertain about the transmission path and can’t rule out a lab accident.
It’s also noteworthy that Fauci acknowledged the US made a grant of $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans. He denied the money was used to study “gain of function” research, which could manipulate a virus for transmission or make it more virulent.
Although there is still much to learn about the most lethal pandemic in a century, we must wait to see whether Biden is serious about getting the truth or just going through the motions.
The suspicion is warranted because, when it comes to China, Biden is severely compromised. He has been identified as “the big guy” scheduled to get a secret 10 percent cut of a deal cooked up by son Hunter Biden to work with a Chinese energy giant, and the Biden family received at least $11 million for work done while Joe was vice-president.
As I wrote Sunday, China knows everything about the deal, including Joe’s planned involvement, but Americans are largely in the dark.
Keep that history in mind. If Biden lets China off the hook on the coronavirus, there might be a reason that has nothing to do with science.
Safe NYC crucial
With the city’s mayoral primaries just three weeks away, crime and public disorder continue to soar. Yet not all candidates see the same problems or solutions.
Consider the contrasting approach of two Democrats, both black.
Maya Wiley, vying to be the most left-wing candidate, released an anti-police ad Tuesday in which she insists cops don’t see black New Yorkers as “people who deserve to breathe.”
As a video shows police officers driving into protesters in June 2020, Miley says they “ran into peaceful protesters, beat others to the ground, and New York’s leaders defended it.”
On the other hand, Eric Adams, an ex-cop, put the main focus where it belongs: on the criminals. In a Memorial Day statement, he ticked off the recent carnage of robbery, stabbings and shootings, then added:
“This is unacceptable. Every New Yorker deserves to feel safe in our city. Public safety is the key to prosperity.”
That last line highlights an often-ignored link between crime and poverty. It was best summed up by the late Congressman John Lewis, who once said while it’s beyond dispute that poverty causes crime, it’s also true that crime causes poverty.
Adams gets it, Wiley doesn’t.
Early sex-ed school daze
Reader Ruth Cohen, noting the galling stories about way-too-early sex education in some of the city’s top schools, recalls the way it used to be. She writes: “PS 161 failed to teach gender identity in kindergarten and masturbation studies in first grade. I learned the hard way. Oops!”
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